Sydney has an insatiable appetite for culture but won't share the spoils

By Andy Marks

14 June 2018 — 3:17pm

“And finally, monsieur, a wafer-thin mint?” Recent consternation over Sydney’s arts and culture glut brings to mind the restaurant scene from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, when John Cleese’s maître d’ plys an insatiable Mr Creosote — aka Terry Jones — with all the fare he can stomach until he literally explodes.

Sydney’s cultural appetite, it seems, knows no bounds. But don’t dare suggest the harbour city has had enough, or worse, could share the bounty.

The crowds at Circular Quay for this year's Vivid festival.Credit:James Alcock

Take the Vivid festival. Overcrowding, we hear, has made it “impossible”. How dreadful. Basking in the glow of all that culture has never been so gruelling. Meanwhile, in large areas of western Sydney, the closest we get to a light show is a mosquito sparking the insect zapper at the local chicken shop.

Entirely reasonable suggestions that Vivid be “less frequent” or, heaven forbid, be held “elsewhere some of the time” are refused. The Tourism Minister responds that this is a job for the crowd control experts.

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Would it be so bad if Vivid were held in, say, Campbelltown, Liverpool, Penrith or Blacktown every other year? Isn’t that what creating a vibrant 30-minute city is all about, prioritising access to cultural events as highly as jobs and services?

Most of Vivid’s visitors treks for more than half-an-hour into the Sydney CBD for the privilege of being crowd controlled. Yet Parramatta — which the Greater Sydney Commission has anointed as Sydney’s centre — is far more accessible to a higher number of Sydneysiders. The success out west of night-time events like Winterlights, Parramasala, Tropfest and Loy Krathong proves that.

The Powerhouse Museum is heading west.Credit:Louise Kennerley

Culture doesn’t mysteriously evaporate at the point where Broadway becomes Parramatta Road. Nor should arts and cultural institutions be necessarily wedded to one spot. The Powerhouse, for instance, moved between three locations before settling at Ultimo and pending relocation to Parramatta.

Changing the nature and location of our encounters with arts and culture is critical if we are to extend their capacity to enliven and shape our cities.

In The Shock of the New, Hughes observed that the opening of the Eiffel Tower in Paris in the late 1800s marked a pronounced “change” in “the conditions for seeing. It wasn’t the view of the tower from the ground that counted, it was seeing the ground from the tower. Nobody”, he remarked, “except a few men in balloons had ever seen it before.”

The tower, Hughes ventured, marked a “pivot in human consciousness”. It gave a “mass audience” the opportunity to “see what you and I take for granted”

The Eiffel Tower changed our way of seeing.Credit:Louie Douvis

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Moving Vivid, or indeed, the Powerhouse, to western Sydney isn’t a “pivot” of the scale Hughes describes, but it is important we stay focused on the possibilities a move presents. Cities and those that live within them can only grow through changing their way of seeing. Globally, cultural institutions and arts festivals have become successful through bold challenges to staid perceptions.

For example, Park City, on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, was in decline in the 1980s due to industry wind-downs. Now host to the Sundance Film Festival, Park City contributes an average of $530 million a year to the Utah economy.

When we look to redress structural inequity in the arts, or even just capacity constraints, look first at the possibilities a changed view can bring. Otherwise, Sydney, “how would you like [your culture] served? All, uh, mixed up together in a bucket?”